What Kanye West’s presidential announcement tells us about 2016

The 2016 winners of August: Trump, Carson, Sanders … The 2016 losers of August: Hillary, Jeb, Walker, and Rubio … But remember, he or she who wins August doesn’t necessarily win in the end … Why everyone needs to pay more attention to Ben Carson … Walker: It’s a “legitimate issue” to look at building a wall between the U.S. and Canada … After a month of Biden buzz about his ’16 intentions, he still hasn’t set up a fundraising committee … Fundraising woes for Jeb? … And Boehner vs.The rapper made his big announcement Sunday night at MTV’s Video Music Awards at the end of a rambling 10-½ minute speech to accept a lifetime achievement award.

This past weekend’s new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll of Iowa perfectly captures the presidential candidates who won August and the summer — and those who didn’t.Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has emerged as a leading Republican presidential candidate in Iowa and is closing in on front-runner Donald Trump in the state that hosts the first 2016 nomination balloting contest. The latest Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll shows billionaire Trump with the support of 23 percent of likely Republican caucus participants, followed by Carson at 18 percent. But given the growing strength of the nonpoliticians in the 2016 Republican primary – Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina – all bets are off.

Trump vaulted to the top spot by insulting immigrants, women, war heroes, journalists and anyone who crossed him — and doing so with unbridled glee. The losers of August on the GOP side: Try Scott Walker (who is now tied for third with Ted Cruz in Iowa — the state where he was seen as the clear frontrunner), Jeb Bush (who’s tied for fifth), and Marco Rubio (ditto). (Our friend Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report has a similar list of winners and losers; great minds think alike.) What do Trump, Carson, and Sanders all have in common? He finds his highest ratings among those planning to attend the caucuses for the first time (69 percent) and limited-government Tea Party activists (73 percent). But keep this in mind: During the last three presidential cycles (2004, 2008, 2012), the winners of August didn’t go on to capture the presidential nomination. Besides not being a politician like Trump and having a willingness to speak his mind (no matter how out of it he is), Carson is the antithesis of Trump.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton was crushing Barack Obama in the August before the nominating contests, while John McCain was essentially given up for dead during that summer. They’re also unhappy with Republicans in Congress, with 54 percent merely “unsatisfied” and another 21 percent “mad as hell.” Of particular note is the quiet rise of Carson, who couldn’t be more different from Trump, at least in temperament. And in 2012, the August winners were Michele Bachmann (who won the Iowa Straw Poll) and Rick Perry (who soared in the polls after his presidential launch). The Register poll also showed Carson with the highest favorability rating of anybody in the Republican field at 79 percent positive and only 8 percent negative.

Now if Trump/Carson/Sanders end winning in February and capture their party’s nomination, we’ll look back on this August as the turning points for them. Christian conservatives, who characterize almost 40 % of doubtless caucus individuals within the ballot, could also be beginning to coalesce across the former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. One other point: While the Des Moines Register poll is the unquestioned gold standard in Iowa, it widely differs from the other August polling, which found Clinton up about 20-30 points in the Hawkeye State. When their totals are combined, Trump and Carson—two men without any elected experience—are backed by more than four in 10 likely caucus participants. Those numbers, in fact, represent a big victory for him: Last May, in the previous Iowa Poll, Trump scored at only 27 percent favorable and 63 percent unfavorable.

Add in former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, who additionally has by no means held elective workplace, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who’s operating an explicitly anti- institution marketing campaign, and the full reaches 54 % of the possible citizens. “Trump and Carson, one bombastic and the opposite typically soft-spoken, might hardly be extra totally different of their outward shows,” stated J. For a party in thrall to a natural showman with little known allegiance to Republican ideology, what explains the rise of an otherwise boring doctor who made a name for himself telling off President Obama at the prayer breakfast in 2013? “Trump satisfies the id.

Carson satisfies the superego,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican ad maker and strategist told me in an e-mail. “Trump feeds the nationalist, isolationist, sometimes revanchist sentiment of a lost working and lower middle class overcome by change and economic dislocation. He also enjoys the highest fav/unfav score among GOP caucus-goers: Scott Walker has the second-best fav/unfav in the GOP race, according to that Iowa poll, and he still has lots of upside. He’s the avatar of their anger, even if he asks them to look past all their conservative values to support him.” As for Carson, Wilson said, “Carson is the aspirational story that fills people’s hearts and makes them look at a miracle that could only happen here. The previous Florida governor is backed by simply 6 %, has one of many highest unfavorable scores among the many 17 Republican candidates examined, and has the help of simply 16 % of those that contemplate themselves business-oriented institution Republicans, the group most central to his model.-Canadian border isn’t going to change that perception. “Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire,” he said on “Meet the Press” yesterday. “They raised some very legitimate concerns, including some law enforcement folks that brought that up to me at one of our town hall meetings about a week and a half ago.

So that is a legitimate issue for us to look at.” Here’s the Washington Post on Walker’s struggles: “Walker’s backers see a campaign discombobulated by Trump’s booming popularity and by his provocative language on immigration, China and other issues. The sad subtext of the support is “See, we have our own brilliant black man!” If Carson were former secretary of state Colin Powell, Republicans would be on solid ground.

To us, that’s telling, because if he is going to compete against Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, he’s got to raise between $50 million and $100 million before the first contests begin. While some of their leaders have expressed skepticism about the potential to unify behind one candidate in such a crowded race, there’s an opening for that.

More than three-quarters of Christian conservatives in the poll say they could be convinced to back someone other than their first or second choice, if they could be assured that another Christian conservative would win. Speaking of fundraising, we learned over the weekend that three of Jeb Bush’s fundraisers left the campaign. “There are different versions of what transpired.

If his competitors can successfully raise questions about Trump’s credentials as a Christian conservative, they could potentially peel off some of the front-runner’s support. The Florida-based fundraising consultants — Kris Money, Trey McCarley and Debbie Aleksander — have said that they voluntarily quit the campaign and were still working with Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise Super PAC. One major unknown for the caucuses is the size of the electorate, which has been around 120,000 on the Republican side for the past two Iowa caucuses. Others said the three, who worked under the same contract, were let go because they were no longer needed for the current phase of the campaign,” Politico writes. One of Trump’s campaign goals is to get thousands of new people to vote, a move that helped Barack Obama score an upset on the Democratic side in 2008.

And Politico’s Marc Caputo adds that Jeb is grinding out fundraisers throughout September, wondering if it’s a sign of fundraising troubles. “[W]as his [hard-dollar] fundraising too little? A 2011 editorial in The Post argued that such an amendment “would deprive policymakers of the flexibility they need to address national security and economic emergencies. It would revise the Constitution in a way that would give dangerous power to a congressional minority.” “Most of the serious candidates are planning to foment voter interest and peak [in] the weeks before Iowa and New Hampshire,” Glover told me. Meantime, Bush and the family have a grueling fundraising schedule.” President Obama heads to Alaska today to discuss climate change, and we learned that the Obama administration changed the name of Alaska’s Mount McKinley — in honor of former President William McKinley of Ohio — to Mount Denali. Trump’s supporters in Iowa a have a higher level of trust in their candidate than others in the field to make the right decisions, if he makes it to the White House.

That decision angered Ohio’s John Boehner: “There is a reason President McKinley’s name has served atop the highest peak in North America for more than 100 years, and that is because it is a testament to his great legacy. McKinley served our country with distinction during the Civil War as a member of the Army,” the House speaker said in a statement, per Roll Call. “He made a difference for his constituents and his state as a member of the House of Representatives and as Governor of the great state of Ohio. That’s in keeping with a claim he made to reporters Aug. 15, shortly after landing by helicopter outside the Iowa State Fair, saying it’s mostly the media that cares about policy papers and positions. I’m deeply disappointed in this decision.” John Kasich stumps in Michigan… Marco Rubio is in Reno, NV… Ted Cruz has multiple events in New Hampshire… Rand Paul is in Vermont… And Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum campaign in Iowa.

Carson has an 11-percentage-point advantage over Trump among seniors and 7-percentage-point-point edge among Christian conservatives. “I’m sick and tired of the political class,” said Lisa Pilch, 54, a middle school physical education teacher leaning toward Carson who lives in Springville, Iowa. “I just like his tone and think he’s someone who could pull us together, rather than the polarization we have right now. It’s just not something I’m interested in.” Paul, who was backed by just 4 percent, was perceived a year ago to have an advantage in Iowa, given the third-place finish in the 2012 caucuses recorded by his father, former Representative Ron Paul of Texas.

For Walker, who has been in a slump since his lackluster debate performance, the poll is certain to further reduce expectations around his performance in Iowa, which had grown to the point where anything short of a win would have been viewed as a loss. Biden decides to run for the Democratic presidential nomination, his Senate reputation as a friend to financial institutions could be a significant obstacle, especially if he wants to make inroads with the party’s liberal base, which has become increasingly skeptical and often passionately hostile to anything connected to Wall Street,” writes the New York Times. Chris Christie of New Jersey said on Saturday that if he were elected president he would combat illegal immigration by creating a system to track foreign visitors the way FedEx tracks packages.” WALKER: His supporters are hoping for a reboot, writes the Washington Post: “These supporters say what is needed now is a return to basics, a more disciplined focus on the issues Walker long has championed in Wisconsin.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, former New York Governor George Pataki, and former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore all recorded support of less than 1 percent.